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In this space last week, I mentioned the strange story of Takeo Tamiya, who, in becoming president of the Japan Medical Association, rose to the highest pinnacle of the Japanese medical profession in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

To say the least this was an undeserved triumph. With the possible exception of Nazi Germany’s diabolical Dr. Josef Mengele, Tamiya must rank as the most notorious medical doctor in history. The fact is he had played a particularly significant role in Japan’s war effort as chief recruiter for Unit 731, the Japanese imperial army’s notorious biological warfare research organization. All the evidence is that he was highly effective in persuading the brightest young medical graduates to join the satanic effort.

As documented by, among other authors, Sheldon Harris (Factories of Death), and Peter Williams and David Wallace (Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets), Unit 731 committed some of the most abominable war crimes in history. In a shocking breach of one of the oldest and most universally observed rules in medicine, Unit 731 used human beings as guinea pigs in countless grotesquely cruel experiments.

The victims, most of them Chinese, may have numbered as many as 12,000, according to Harris. Some were injected with horse blood. Others died an agonizing death suspended upside down. One unfortunate was placed in a centrifugal separator to extract the blood from his body. Then there were the vivisection experiments -- conducted without an anesthetic As the war ended in August 1945, those human guinea pigs who were still alive were summarily executed to keep Unit 731’s activities secret.

As the reaction to last week’s commentary has demonstrated, apologists continue to this day to suggest that postwar Japan somehow did not know who Tamiya was. For anyone familiar with Japan this is simply not credible.

As the late Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, has documented, the true significance of Unit 731’s “water purification plant” in Manchuria, where the most notorious experiments were conducted, was widely understood in the higher reaches of Japanese society even during the war. Over a fifteen-year period – from 1930 to 1945 – Unit 731’s military chiefs often spoke to large audiences at army medical colleges, civilian universities, and scientific conferences, and made little secret of the fact that humans were used. On occasion, they used motion pictures of human experiments and even showed preserved human parts to make their point.

Writing in 1994, Harris explained: “Knowledge of BW [biological warfare], including human experimentation, was shared by many Japanese who belonged to a certain stratum of society. The military, the scientific community, key elements within the Diet, and members of the extended royal family were privy to the secret…Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of army medical doctors, veterinarians, biologists, chemists, microbiologists, technical staff, and the like were rotated regularly to Manchuria and to occupied China. Many of these people were employed in the human experiment stations, and either participated directly in the experiments or were told about them by others who did work with humans. At the least, they heard rumors concerning offensive BW work with humans conducted in their workplace.”

Almost as soon as the war ended, Unit 731 leaders moved to do a deal with the U.S. Army, and in return for sharing their knowledge they received immunity from prosecution for war crimes. In a classic illustration of how Americans allow themselves to be out-negotiated in Japan, the deal was entered into by Colonel Murray Sanders, a young medical officer, before he discovered that human guinea pigs had been used.

Soon the truth began to leak out. In January 1946, the Japanese press carried allegations by Japanese Communist Party leaders that members of the Japanese army medical corps had infected Chinese and American prisoners of war with bubonic plague. These were also reported by the U.S. Army newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes and the New York Times.

Then in a war crimes trial in the Soviet Union in 1949, many of the most appalling details of Unit 731 emerged for the first time, when twelve captured Japanese army officers were put on trial. Although the trial was dismissed by the Japanese establishment as a show trial, the Soviets subsequently demonstrated the validity of their charges beyond a reasonable doubt by making a massive dossier available in several languages including Japanese and English.

All this notwithstanding, Tamiya was appointed president of the Japan Medical Association in 1950. Although his tenure was cut short by officers of the American occupation, who forced him to stand down, as soon as the occupation ended in 1952, he was reinstated. He therefore ranked as the only person in the association's history to serve two separate spells as president.

Although Tamiya is far beyond justice -- he died in 1963 -- this does not mean the case is closed. In a war in which particularly shocking things were done on all sides, the Japanese medical profession's role in Unit 731 was uniquely shocking. If Americans have it within them to atone for Hiroshima (Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi have visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and U.S. Ambassador John Roos attended commemoration ceremonies in 2010 and 2012), it is past time the Japanese establishment got over its "amnesia" about Unit 731.